NE LEGAL BUREAU
CHENNAI, JULY 27
The Madras High Court has asked the Centre if the convicts in Rajiv Gandhi assassination case Nalini and her husband Murugan can be permitted to make at least one video call from prison to his widowed mother in Sri Lanka.
A bench of Justice N Kirubakaran and Justice V M Velumani sought the Centre’s response on a plea by S Padma, Nalinis mother, seeking to permit her daughter and Murugan to make video calls to her mother-in-law in Sri Lanka and sister-in- law in London for at least 10 minutes daily. Consider this plea on humanitarian grounds, the bench asked Assistant Solicitor General of India G Karthikeyan on Monday.
The petitioner has alleged that Murugan was not permitted to witness through video call the funeral of his father who died on April 27. The Tamil Nadu government had earlier informed the court that there was no provision either in the state prison rules or in government orders to allow a prisoner to make video calls or even voice calls to any person in any foreign country.
It said the issues involving a foreign country come under the ambit of the Ministry of External Affairs and that the state prison authorities or the government cannot take decisions with the former”s concurrence. Beside Nalini and her husband, the others convicted in the Rajiv case are A G Perarivalan, Santhan, Jayakumar, Ravichandran and Robert Pyas. All are serving life imprisonment for their role in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on May 21, 1991 by an LTTE suicide-bomber at nearby Sriperumbudur.
